Norman O. Brown is not a tantric fellow.

Mon Aug 15 08:54:22 CDT 2005

NOB's titles were so alluring, I had to surf NOB.
But his example shows that by greatest diligence,
yet lacking the direct act to transgress/transcend,
one may only ever asymptoptically approach, never
puncture or fathom, the boundary of the simulacrum.
Glosses tell me NOB did not comprehend Blake, Boehme...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_O._Brown

 ...as "Nobby".
 The range of his interests and studies broadened
 to include
 James Joyce (Brown's Closing Time is a brief study of
 Finnegans Wake ), re-encounters with classical poetry
 and mythology, including scholarly-poetic responses to
 Propertius , and to
 Ovid 's
 Metamorphoses , an engagement with American
 modernist poetry (especially
 Robert Duncan and
 Louis Zukofsky ) and a deep study of
 Islam .

http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2191&editorial_id=11225

 Brown's reading of Freud in Life Against Death had two main
 theses. first, Brown offered a riddle: |How can there be an
 animal that represses itself?' Freud's texts offered a
 solution. ...

 Above all Brown criticized psychoanalysis for
 endorsing dualism: the separation of the soul (or psyche)
 from the body. The true aim of psychoanalysis, he argued,
 should be to reunite the two. This can be achieved by
 returning men and women to the |polymorphous perversity' of
 early infancy, a state that corresponds to transcendence of
 the self found in art and play and known to the great
 Christian mystics, such as William Blake and Jakob Boehme.

http://reference.allrefer.com/encyclopedia/B/BrownNO.html

 ... Brown thought that the degree to which
 sexuality was repressed in America led not only to the
 stifling of instincts but also to a perversion of human
 drives from life and art to money and death.

http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/?channel_id=2191&editorial_id=11226

 The Wake class was also my first exposure to
 theory,
 to the idea that thought,
 like numbers,
 could be squared,
 so to speak -
 taken to a higher level;
 and that this was what made thinking worthwhile.

 But only with the understanding that you then had
 to bring it back to matters at hand,
 to the present,
 to what was happening.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520078284/ref%3Dnosim/onfocus/104-5014785-6111900
 Amazon.com: Books: Apocalypse And/or Metamorphosis

 Written over 30 years, these essays chronicle
 Brown's path from Marx to Freud to Dionysius. His ideas of
 freedom and ecstasy recall the playfulness of Derrida, but
 he is closest to George Bataille

 Brown links the creativity he
 wants to prophetic knowledge that ought to embrace Islamic
 as well as Judeo-Christian elements. Scientific knowledge
 won't do: "So called science is the attempt to democratise
 knowledge, . . . to substitute method for insight,
 mediocrity for genius."

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0520071069/104-5014785-6111900?v=glance
 Amazon.com: Books: Love's Body

 This is a profound and learned book that is experienced as
 much as read. It is a series of meditations, inspired by a
 wide range of other thinkers who are referenced after each
 section, as opposed to the unified argument put forward in
 Life Against Death.

 Unfortunately, Brown is too wrapped up in religous mysticism
 and theistic nonesense.

 Brown was a a heavy influence on Jim Morrison and the music
 of The Doors

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0819561444/104-5014785-6111900?v=glance
 Amazon.com: Books: Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

 Ultimately, the Freudian view of repression makes me wish
 for the opportunity to digress into everything that is
 supposed to be secret in modern society. Norman O. Brown
 provides an intellectual platform for viewing the ultimate
 comedy of our situation, in which the science of Eros is
 linked to the politics of bizarre behavior in a manner that
 can hardly avoid being pornographic.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0940262266/104-5014785-6111900?v=glance
 Amazon.com: Books: Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth

 This classic, prescient work (first published in 1947)
 foreshadows all subsequent work greeting the return of the
 gods. Brown asks whether Hermes the Thief is the prototype,
 from which the Trickster was derived by extension and
 analogy|or is the notion of trickery fundamental, and that
 of theft merely a specific manifestation of it?"

http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/archive/2002/October/04/local/stories/04local.htm
 October 4, 2002
 Norman O. Brown, a charismatic lecturer and counterculture
 hero who inspired his colleagues and thousands of students
 for more than a decade at UC Santa Cruz, died Wednesday at
 the age of 89. ...more...

http://66.218.69.11/search/cache?ei=UTF-8&cop=mss&p=%22Norman+O.+Brown%22&u=www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/n/norman_o_brown.html&w=%22norman+o+brown%22&d=1ADAE03E78&icp=1&.intl=us
 Norman O. Brown Quotes

 All currency is neurotic currency.

 In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement,
 psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what
 common sense and the poets have long known - that the
 essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness.

 The dynamics of capitalism is postponement of enjoyment to
 the constantly postponed future.

 The view only changes for the lead dog.

http://66.218.69.11/search/cache?ei=UTF-8&cop=mss&p=%22Norman+O.+Brown%22&u=www.metroactive.com/papers/cruz/03.23.05/brown-0512.html&w=%22norman+o+brown%22&d=1744CEBFF3&icp=1&.intl=us

 Ultimately, Brown aligned himself with the politically
 incorrect (and inherently undemocratic) position that the
 order established by scientific analysis, by the wealth of
 ideas in libraries, must come second to that which can only
 be learned from the Dionysian spirit.

 "It is possible to be mad and to be unblest, but it is not
 possible to get the blessing without the madness; it is not
 possible to get the illuminations without the derangement,"

"I wagered my intellectual life on the
 idea of finding in Freud what was missing in Marx."

 spent the rest of his career engaged in an expansive lunge
 toward a metamorphosis of human consciousness.

http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2002w40/msg00126.htm

 ``I have absolutely no use for the human-potential movement,''

http://www.root-1.co.il/
 The Sadducee Printouts
 (Misc. wierdness in the Surf tailings)

Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
Copyleft(!) Forward freely.